A chance to ask questions to and hear instant feedback from the Secretary of State for Education! I’m in! And in I was…

45 minutes later and what had we learnt? Well, I’ll try to give my rundown of what I learnt – I’m sure many people will have picked out other things so this will not be an exhaustive list:

1. Teacher Recruitment has been recognised as a need

This was helped by the fact that just before this went live, a study was revealed that teacher training applications have dropped by 12%. I think that there are some pretty obvious answers that could be given to go towards solving this issue – all falling under making teaching more appealing or attractive – but at least it has been noted and something will be done to entice and inspire more people to become excellent teachers.

2. Nicky Morgan must not have a clue about the current climate of others’ educational views

When asked why there was not as much educational discussion in the General Election campaigns, we were told that this was probably because there was a lot of agreement on education. I am presuming this was referring to agreement amongst the political parties. I know someone who was running for Parliament for Labour in another region…this was clearly not the case. Labour do not have the same views in education, as far as I am aware with my fairly limited knowledge of politics. That one went past me…

One big issue I have with the current government and their policies on education is free schools – and the main thing I have issue with free schools about is the option to employ unqualified teachers. We are being constantly told to raise standards and achievement in schools (and rightly so) but how can this be accomplished if more and more people who are unqualified to teach are teaching the nation’s upcoming generation? Nicky mentioned a few times the need to restore teaching as a profession…this will NOT happen as long as teachers do not need to be qualified – it is a major contradiction!

4. No budging on EBACC

When quizzed about EBACC and allowing the arts to have more weighting in the curriculum, this was pretty much rebuffed – the reason being that Universities are looking for the traditional academic subjects…but as was very well pointed out ‘Not everyone goes to University’. I love Maths, I can really get into English, I am fascinated by Science – but there MUST be an opportunity for a wider range of subject content. Nicky did point out that up until KS3 children should be getting a broad and balanced curriculum and then students can decide to have options in the ‘art’ subjects. Yet – as a Year 6 teacher – I know that even at the end of KS1 and KS2 (because of assessment and data) it is not as broad and balanced as it should be.

Q: Will there be any changes made as a result of this live discussion?

Probably not. I would have loved to see Nicky hear some of the comments given in and sincerely think about what could be done differently to what is currently being done (because some things do need to change) – but I was probably a little naïve for thinking that would happen in this setting. Maybe something said will spark a thought, maybe not – but something that was said promising to hear…

One of Nicky’s self-prescribed appraisal targets is to listen more.

Will this ‘listening’ be a “that’s very interesting, now let me go and do what I was doing before” or a “hmm…that’s an interesting idea, maybe we can work with that”? Hopefully it will be the latter and I for one quite enjoyed the opportunity to hear our Education Secretary speak and voice her side of things, rather than the cynicism that can be down heartening about education.